I've been thinking a lot about long walks lately, with my Ozarks run coming up this fall, so when I ran across a Japanese traveler's account of walking the Camino de Santiago, I sat down with my coffee and read the whole thing. If you've never heard of it, the Camino is an old pilgrimage network that runs across northern Spain to the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, where folks have been walking for over a thousand years to reach what are said to be the bones of St. James. And they're still doing it. By the hundreds of thousands, from what I understand.

The piece, written by a traveler who walked it through Galicia, caught my eye for a couple reasons. First, because the whole thing runs on wayfinding a country boy would feel right at home with: scallop shells and yellow arrows. No GPS voice barking at you. No app. You follow a shell carved into a stone wall or a yellow arrow painted on a fence post, and if you keep your eyes open, that's enough to get you 500 miles across a foreign country. Tell you what, that's navigation the way my dad taught me, by landmarks and paying attention.

The scallop shell goes way back as the pilgrim's mark. Folks used to carry one home from Galicia as proof they'd made the walk, and the ridges all converging on one point were said to stand for the many roads of Europe funneling toward Santiago. The yellow arrows are newer, painted starting in the 20th century by volunteers who didn't want pilgrims wandering lost through the hills, and between the two of them, a walker from Japan or Korea or Kansas can find their way without speaking a word of Spanish.

What gets me is who's out there walking it now. It used to be a strictly religious exercise, and for plenty of pilgrims it still is. But the trail these days is full of people walking off grief, walking away from a desk job, walking because they hit a certain age and wanted to do something their knees would still allow. You sleep in albergues, cheap hostels set up for pilgrims, and you eat whatever the village is cooking that night, and you walk 15 to 20 miles a day with everything you own on your back. My kind of math. Not much room for junk when you're carrying it all.

The Galicia stretch the writer describes is the wet, green end of the walk, more Ireland than the Spain most folks picture. Mist on the stone walls, eucalyptus along the track, little hamlets where the population is three old men and a dog. You come over the last rise and there's the cathedral towers, and I'm told there isn't a dry eye on the square, believer or not. Arriving somewhere under your own power does that to a person.

I reckon the reason it's booming now is simple. People are starved for slow. Everything in modern life moves at interstate speed, and the Camino moves at foot speed. You can't hurry it, you can't skip ahead, and nobody on the trail cares what you do for a living. A month of putting one boot in front of the other sorts a person out in ways a vacation never will.

Would I walk it? I've got a bad habit of seeing a long trail and measuring it in days, and the Camino comes out to about a month. That's a serious chunk of time for a man with a fall hunting trip on the calendar. But I'll admit I've caught myself looking at boots lately, and thinking a gravel road I know in Shannon County and a pilgrim track in Galicia aren't so different as they sound. Both of them just ask you to keep walking and pay attention. Might be all any of us need.